My Olympus E-500 DSLR...
In 24 hours (on Tuesday, April 28, 2008), I shall be the proud owner of an 8 megapixel Olympus E-500 digital SLR, which comes with the lens in the top pic. Note: To convert focal lengths to 35mm-equivalent, you double it for this camera - others may be different, it depends on the size of the CCD (the electronic gizmo that records the image in place of film - the image is then saved to a memory card for permanent storage, or until you delete it).
There's an excellent, and comprehensive, review here.
The E-500 is part of the Four Thirds system, an open-source specification for cameras, and lenses, designed from the ground up as digital, not adapted from film cameras. It was originated by Kodak, quickly followed by Olympus, and more companies are coming onboard all the time. I have no idea why it's called Four Thirds (usually written 4/3); the answer is undoubtedly on the Four Thirds website but there's so much PR dross to wade through I quickly lost the will to live when I tried to find out. As the originators of 4/3 are Japanese, the reason is bound to be weird anyway.* For example, early 4/3 cameras were just known by the model designation, but after a while the E-500 sprouted the meaningless prefix EVOLT, which has now spread across the range - see, I told you the Japanese were weird!
* Finally got it figured out, and it's nothing to do with four thirds of anything - it relates to the aspect ratio of 4:3 (i.e. 4 units wide by 3 units high, or four 4ths wide by three 4ths high, if you like). 4:3 is an aspect ratio everyone is familiar with - it's your TV screen (unless you've gone widescreen). So, compared to a standard 35mm negative, which is 3:2 and is the reason why the standard-size photo is 6"x4", a standard 4:3 photo, if such a thing existed, would be 8"x6".
I had to borrow the money for it, as it was too good to pass up at the price (£160, secondhand but in very good nick), and, fortuitously, it's one of the best digital SLRs available at a sane price (it's no longer made, having been replaced with the E-510, with 10 megapixels and image stabilisation, and a substantially bigger price tag*), with outstanding image quality and a very fast write time (that's the time it takes to record the image on the memory card), with the right memory card which, apparently, is Sandisk's Extreme III Compact Flash card.
With a T-2 adapter, it will attach easily to my
scope, and I'll be able to see clearly what I'm looking at on its large,
2.5" LCD screen (which has a reflective layer so, instead of fading to
invisibility in bright sun, it stays clear and bright). For comparison, the
LCD screen on my Fuji digital is 1.8", and is bleached to invisibility
by bright sun.
Actually, that was wrong. Because it has an optical viewfinder (very useful), for technical reasons (the mirror and shutter obscure the CCD, so the LCD screen gets no images from it), you can't use the LCD screen as a viewfinder as you can on most digitals. Disappointing, but not an insurmountable problem, as the viewfinder which, unlike film cameras, it totally free of clutter, gives a clear image.
It's a bit of a bugger, though, that I recently bought an auto-focus 35mm SLR outfit (because it's getting hard for me to focus manually), but as that's virtually new I should have little trouble selling it. The digital, of course, is auto everything.
So, after a short spell to familiarise myself with my new toy (the manual for my a-f 35mm camera, for example, is 44 pages, the E-500's manual is 216 pages - that's a steep learning curve!), and assuming it ever stops raining, I'm off to the wildfowl reserve at Martin Mere for a digiscoping session - next week, hopefully. Ironically, a few days before spotting this camera on sale, I finally figured out a way to mount my Fuji digital camera to my scope. The result would have been circular images, but I could live with that. The E-500 will give far better results, though. Rectangular, too!
Below are a few images of the camera. I'm searching for a back view with a scene showing on the LCD, rather than a menu screen - if all else fails, I'll take one myself.
Browsing the Web, looking for information and opinion, I had a long-standing prejudice reinforced in no uncertain terms - and it's that, with occasional exceptions, digital photographers seem to know bugger all about the basics of photography, and no matter how many bells and whistles your camera has, ignorance of the fundamentals will almost always give crap results. "Almost" because even the dumbest, most fumble-fingered, oaf can take something really good quite by accident!
This is a fairly typical example. A guy on a forum was wanting to know why his pics were blurred and his camera giving him mysterious messages (RTFM, pal!). His lens, he said, was set to infinity. How far away is your subject, asked a helpful reader (just before losing the will to live, I suspect). Oh, 8 to 10 feet.
OK - think about that; this pillock was snapping something within spitting distance, with a focus setting he could have used to photograph the moon! I mean, how stupid do you have to be not to know what “infinity” means, and how inappropriate it is to something 10 feet away?
Luckily, I started in photography, in my teens, with just a camera and the instruction sheet that you got with rolls of film for setting the exposure, which was remarkably accurate. I then graduated to using a light meter and, eventually, via a series of SLRs and compacts of varying degrees of sophistication, to my first digital camera six years ago (this represents a period of 40 years or so), so it presented no photography-related problems at all - I just needed to learn the technology.
These days, apparently, people are happy to buy an often vastly expensive digital and, starting from a position of total photographic ignorance, proceed to take terrible photos and to blame their camera when they don’t get the desired results. These numpties should be prevented, by law, from buying anything more complex than a Box Brownie - and they’d probably cock that up!!
By the way, RTFM = Read The F***ing Manual! Something almost no-one does and everyone should. Why? Well film cameras have three basic controls - focus, lens aperture and shutter speed (with maybe zoom as well). OK, many had a lot more settings, but they were just variations on the theme of the basic 3 or 4, like auto-focus. Digital cameras have many more controls - sometimes hundreds more, so while such a hefty manual may be daunting, it is essential that you familiarise yourself with it (the first thing I did, even before my camera arrives, was to download a copy).
Before taking any pics that actually matter, I’m going to play with it for a while, photographing anything and everything, to get the feel of it and familiarise myself with at least some of its controls. This, of course, is much easier than with film, as even the worst photos cost money to develop and print, but with digital you can just delete the rubbish, but not, I would suggest, before uploading them to your computer, to see what you did wrong. And don’t blame the camera for your errors - they don’t make mistakes, any more than computers do (assuming neither has a fault). People do.